routes

The Rails community released Rails 5.0.0.beta1 just before christmas. I’ve added this release to route_downcaser’s test-suite for version 1.1.5, and I’m happy to say, that everything works out of the box. So unless something substantially changes in Rails (which ought not happen), then there will be no problems with upgrading to Rails 5.0 – at least with regards to route_downcaser.

Update 2011-03-10: Brian Marquis pointed out, that I’ve missed showing a good way to actually load the .rb file containing the middleware. This has now been added to the article.

Update 2010-11-06: Rails 3 has changed its routing mechanism. One of the changes involves which environment variable is used as the source for routing. In Rails 2.3.x it was REQUEST_URI, in Rails 3 it is PATH_INFO. I have changed the middleware code to take care of both versions.

At our dog-site www.gipote.dk we have a shop selling dog-tags. The URL for this shop is www.gipote.dk/hundetegn (hundetegn = dog-tag in danish). However one of our marketing-guys have a tendency to capitalize the word “hundetegn”, so that URL reads www.gipote.dk/Hundetegn (with a capital H).

Rails will yield a 404 NOT FOUND on this, simply because it is case sensitive. The Rails core team doesn’t seem to want this changed, but I found a neat way of doing it myself: Using the new Rack Middleware framework.

First the solution:

Create a file called downcase_route_middleware.rb and put it in RAILS_ROOT/lib or wherever you think middleware files ought to go. Fill it with this piece of code:

Update: The line:config.autoload_paths << "#{config.root}/app/middleware"
is my general way of using middleware. I always places all my middleware classes in a folder called app/middleware. The line above enables Rails to automatically search the autoload-path for a file that matches the middleware class used (i.e. "downcase_route_middleware.rb").

If this is the only middleware class that you use, you can simply do arequire "downcase_route_middleware.rb""
somewhere in your config initializers. I just find the above solution more elegant.

Restart your rails application, and it will now accept all kinds of casing on the routing part.

Note: This code only downcases the part of the URI containing namespace, controller, action, and id. It does not touch the querystring parameters, and for a good reason too: The parameter values could contain some context in their casing.

Now for the explanation:

Rails 2.3 introduced Rack middleware. A lot of people have already explained this concept, so instead of going into details, I suggest that you read Pratik's explanation on Rails Guides and Ryan's Railscast on the subject.

Basically, my middleware class gets access to the environment hash and passes it on to the next middleware class on the stack. In between I get to modify the nessecary data. In this case it's the REQUEST_URI (In Rails 3 it's PATH_INFO), since ActionController::Dispatcher uses the URI from here to determine the correct route. By converting the URI to lowercase, ActionController::Dispatcher gets the correct path no matter the case entered by the user.